Translation Report On Medical Texts(Excerpt Of Say Goodbye To Illness)

As one branch of technical article translation, medical translation is regarded as one of the most difficult and the most challenging tasks, particularly for those translators who are not Medical majors. It will be even more difficult if one wants to translate it properly and correctly. This is mainly because medical texts are too professional and contain a lot of medical terms. In addition, accuracy is highly needed for medical text translation; otherwise, it may cause fatal results. This thesis is based on the writer’s translation practice of Say Goodbye to... series written by an American medical practitioner. The writer selects one chapter on the acupuncture meridians in Say Goodbye to Illness for study. This thesis focuses on analyzing the difficulties the writer was faced with in the process of translation, the solutions the writer came up with as well as how she found the solutions. The first part of the thesis is about text analysis, in which the writer firstly gives a brief introduction of the article, covering its background, its main idea and its language analysis; and then the structure of the article. The second part is to illustrate some of the translation theories and strategies which also guided the writer’s own translation. The third part is about the translation analysis of the article, in which the writer cites some typical examples to analyze the difficulties she was confronted from three perspectives---linguistic, pragmatic and cultural level, her solutions and how she actually found the solutions. In the last part, the writer summarizes the most common seen problems and challenges as well as the translation skills and techniques for medical texts based on this translation practice.